Technology Trends in the Classroom

A Backyard Drone Better Not Land On My Dog

At Lesley, I teach a course on the impact of technology on society. When trying to understand change, it helps to see it coming. We can now see something big coming: drones. Drones are a terrific example to use for anticipating change because they are likely to be here—in our backyards—sooner than you might think. I don’t mean the unmanned aerial vehicles used by the Defense Department or by law enforcement. I’m talking about the cheap commercial drone market that Congress has already legislated to proceed in earnest as early as next year. These are small, light, inexpensive machines that are piloted remotely and can carry things.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been tasked to write rules for the commercial operation of drones, and they will be used for a wide variety of purposes. Predictions are of a multi-billion dollar drone industry in the next decade. Once the regulations are in place, the FAA estimates 7,500 commercial drones within 5 years, and 30,000 in US skies in 15 years.

If this seems far-fetched, I urge you to do a quick Amazon search for drones. You’ll see several things. One is that you can buy a drone today. Already, they are affordable. They are lightweight and easy to use. Predictably, there will soon be apps for operating them from cell phones and iPads. Another is that most have high definition cameras on them. As more commercial drone technology develops, they will carry more and do more.

An Amazon search will also show you that the company is experimenting with drones to deliver orders to their consumers. India and Russia reportedly each have restaurants that are trying to deliver pizza via drones. In the US drones are already in use for weather predictions, traffic reports, and some agricultural purposes. And one can imagine humanitarian uses for drones to deliver medicine or other supplies to remote areas.

But given the FAA’s coming regulations, the “take-off” point, so to speak, for drones may expand their use faster than we imagine. Drones may become the next new cool tech toy, the GPS-equivalent holiday gift of 2015. The new “selfie” photo may be taken by camera drones. The very popular GoPro camera can already be mounted on a drone marketed for just this purpose. Will our family vacations soon be captured by personally-controlled overhead cameras on our own drones? Or can we send our drones to hover over an outdoor venue to live stream us a football game or a concert for our convenience?

Neighborhood deliveries and selfie photos are the relatively innocuous ways drones may become prominent in our lives. What about cameras that invade our privacy? Whether they are remotely piloted by our nosy neighbor, a potential criminal, or the government, how would we know? How could we prevent unwanted drones in our space? And if there are truly going to be tens of thousands of these in the air in the next 15 years, what happens when they collide or malfunction over us? Nor it is difficult to speculate about criminals putting weapons instead of cameras on drones.

In the case of drones, seeing change coming isn’t the hard part. The impact on society from widespread affordable drone use is something that soon we might all be living with to understand.